My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [71]
“We’ll take it up with the prime minister,” Brigid sighs.
By noon, beaten down by the midday sun, the pollen and the indifferent-to-hostile crowds, Brigid and I have retreated to the farthest corner of our booth and buried ourselves in manuscripts we brought with us. (The nice thing about working at the Review is that you can always lose yourself in a great story and forget what a terrible career choice you’ve made.) Brigid’s pile of manuscripts, incidentally, is five times larger than mine. She has the worst job in the office, maybe in publishing as a whole. Normally managing editors are scary people who specialize in invading other editors’ dreams at night and making them feel tiny and fearful: they’re the designated ass kickers whose job is to make sure the rest of the staff brings in copy on time and generally meets deadlines. But George has never wanted a magazine that meets deadlines. He wants a magazine that gives him the flexibility to make last-second decisions, fuss over the wording of a sentence and do strange things like send senior editors to book fairs where they accomplish exactly nothing. So he appointed Brigid, an exceedingly fair-minded and somewhat shy poetry fan from Buffalo who would never be mistaken by anyone for Attila the Hun. Her job, amid all the gamboling, towel snapping and other tomfoolery that passes for work at the Review, is to somehow put out four issues a year, which sometimes seems a task beyond hopeless.
“I’m quitting,” she suddenly blurts out, putting her manuscripts down.
“What?” I say, caught off guard. “Why? When?”
“After the next issue. I can’t take it anymore. I’m burned out.”
“Is this because of the anthology screwup?” I wasn’t the only one who had gotten in trouble. Brigid had taken heat, too.
She shakes her head. “It’s not that. It’s just time. I’ve been at the magazine for seven years, and I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. I used to like the fact that it wasn’t an uptight place, but now the magazine has a lot of problems that need to be fixed, and I think it’s someone else’s turn to try.”
“Why not stick around and fix them yourself?” I beg, panicked by the idea of the Review without Brigid.
“Well, for one thing, because whoever it is is going to have to fight with George, and I’m not up for that. At the end of the day, it’s his magazine.”
“And a lot of the problems are caused by him.”
Brigid shrugs. “We’re all so invested in it and think we know better. It’s a good time to move on.”
“Don’t you think you should at least talk to George before you quit?”
Brigid groans. “Have you talked to him lately?” She tells me a story. Recently, an English journalist had called the office and offered to conduct an interview with the heavy-duty French experimentalist author Alain Robbe-Grillet—who isn’t the kind of writer George normally likes to publish, but this time, for whatever reason, he agreed. However, he had forgotten to tell Brigid or anyone else, and he had forgotten as well that fifteen years ago the Review had already published an interview with Robbe-Grillet (who, evidently, had also forgotten).
“The worst part of it was that George figured it out on his own and felt awful, so he wanted to make it up to the poor journalist with an enormous kill fee, which we fought over because it was way more than we can afford.”
Suddenly Brigid’s cell phone rings, and she looks at the caller ID panel. It’s George.
“You take it,” she says, thrusting the phone at me.
“Me? You’re the managing editor!”
“You owe me,” she says. “The anthology?”
I take the phone from her hand.
“Hullo?” I say meekly.
“Hi ho!” booms the voice at the other end of